September 16, 2012 11:28am EDTSeptember 15, 2012 6:45pm EDTAlabama so easily whips Arkansas that it becomes clear the Razorbacks' problems go well beyond an injured Tyler Wilson. Matt Hayes says this is about the absence of Bobby Petrino and his X-and-O's brilliance.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – He’s somewhere in the beautiful Northwest Arkansas town of Rogers, a man and his personal exile.

Look at a map and find the state of Arkansas. Now head north to the Missouri state line and hang a hard left until you reach the Oklahoma state line. The last county in Arkansas, home of the first Wal-Mart store, the middle of nowhere.

He’s working on his marriage, and painfully watching the team he built for a championship run slowly implode. Last week, it was an unthinkable loss to lowly Louisiana-Monroe.

This week it’s top-ranked Alabama, by the humiliating tune of 52-0. And what does the guy replacing Petrino as coach at Arkansas have to say about it?

“I just don’t know what to say,” John L. Smith says, “I told our team the same thing.”

Fortunately for Petrino, there is John L. Smith. The more he coaches; the more Arkansas loses and the team many believed could compete for the SEC and national titles withers away, the more brilliant Petrino looks—warts and all.

You don’t like Bobby Petrino the human being? Fine. Don’t confuse it with Bobby Petrino the coach.

Because once you do; once you think any coach can navigate a battleship of potential through rough waters, you end up with Captain Queeg going down to the deep, murky depths with ol’ Ironside.

Once you do, you get a confused locker room and angry players and a coach whose response is, “the only thing we can do is not give up.” Once you do, you get the star quarterback, who didn’t play because of an injury, calling out his teammates for quitting.

He built a national powerhouse at Louisville (imagine that), and then had Arkansas primed for a breakthrough season before his dirty little secret was exposed (not the mistress, the hiring of the mistress). This, of course, left Arkansas in a mess.

A mess that makes Petrino look better, look—and this is the key—more hireable with each passing week.

I’ve got news for everyone: 10 Tyler Wilsons could have played and Arkansas still wouldn’t have scored on Alabama. This has nothing to do with the personnel at Arkansas—and everything to do with Captain Queeg at the helm.

And one of the best coaches in the game sitting alone in his living room, watching this carnage play out on national television.

With Petrino, Arkansas was lethal; with Smith, Arkansas is lethargic. With Petrino, Wilson was rewriting the school record book. With Smith, Arkansas failed to score in Fayetteville for the first time since 1966.

With Smith, Arkansas can’t find a way to protect Wilson against a middling Sun Belt team, Wilson gets hit too many times (see: concussion), and the Hogs lose him for the biggest game of the season.

With Petrino, Arkansas had the best play caller in the game; a masterful mind who sees calls and scenarios play out before they happen. With Smith, Arkansas has a coach who rotated two quarterbacks (one for obvious run situations; one for obvious pass situations), and effectively took his best player (tailback Knile Davis) out of the game because the Alabama defense knew when the run was coming.

“We have all the faith in the world in our coaches,” said Hogs backup quarterback Brandon Allen.

So Smith has that going for him.

Halfway through this debacle, Smith was running off the field with his team trailing 24-0 and generating 44 yards on 32 plays. It was another classic Queeg halftime moment, rambling about something that meant nothing with a sideline reporter, flailing his hands up and down. It was an eerie flashback to Smith’s days at Michigan State, when he screamed at a sideline reporter about his coaches screwing up the game plan.

There’s only one guy screwing up this team, and the more he does, the quicker the guy hiding out in Rogers, Ark., gets back on the field. Don’t kid yourself: College football is a business, no matter the snake oil Mark Emmert tries to sell you.

It’s about winning games and selling tickets and eventually winning championships. No matter the cost.

If that means hiring a coach who has proven he can win at the elite level even though he may not be the most family-friendly guy, then so be it. That means Kentucky or Tennessee or any other team desperate to make it work has to ask itself a critical question: Do you want to win, or do you want what played out here on a dreary, rainy day?

With 12 minutes to play in the third quarter, Alabama had a 38-0 lead and Arkansas had four turnovers and hadn’t cracked 100 yards of total offense. Fans were filing out of Razorback Stadium by the hundreds upon thousands.

“The only thing we can do,” Smith said, “is do the things we’ve worked on in this building for the last several years.”

There’s one slight problem with that: The guy who led the team the last several years isn’t around.